November 21st

With an absolute surfeit of super games writing, collected from the very smallest blog to the largest online newspaper column, it can only be: This Week in Videogame Blogging.

First up, Laura Parker for Gamespot AU writes about “the need for new experiences in the AAA space” [dead link, no mirror available] and quotes at length a number of smarty-pants game developers and bloggers for their views on the issue.

Adam Ruch at Flickering Colours examines ‘The Metanarrative of Videogames’ [mirror] looking at how videogames nature as deterministic systems affects just about every aspect of their reception.

Matthew Burns at Magical Wasteland writes about Fable 3 this week arguing that for games to present players with good moral decisions requires plenty of context. Until then it’s all ‘Just Another Trick of Perspective’. Zachary Alexander at Hailing from the Edge takes inspiration from Burns’ post in ‘Low Stakes’, and relates a personal story from Fable 3 that suggests a different lesson:

…absurdist humor was able to get my attention, and create an ambiguous moral situation in a way heavy “evil enemy is amassing on the horizon” setups couldn’t.

Troy Goodfellow writes on his blog Flash of Steel about ‘The Aztec National Character’ as seen through the lens of videogames, and in particular, the Civilization series. This is a cycle of posts well worth keeping up with.

Speaking of history, Roger Travis and co. at the new blog ‘Play the Past’ are interested in “thoughtfully exploring and discussing the intersection of cultural heritage (very broadly defined) and games/meaningful play (equally broadly defined).” Here’s their introductory post explaining their goals for the site.

And stretching the idea of history in an entirely different direction, this week Gamers With Jobs have been partying like it’s 1998! Here’s Rob Zachny writing on Thief from a ‘98 perspective; Julian Murdoch on Baldur’s Gate as the hope for CRPG’s; and Allen Cook on Alpha Centauri in ‘Once Upon A Future History’. Does the term retrospective even apply here?

Matthew Weise’s latest piece at Outside Your Heaven ‘How RPG elements hurt good games’ demonstrates why Weise is the go-to Metal Gear Solid expert. Comparing the puzzle-like nature of many earlier MGS bosses, Weise sees the latest game Peace Walker as leaning too heavily on JRPG tropes, with many bosses being reduced to what he describes as “stat-driven endurance battles.”

On a related tangent, at the Escapist Brendan Main opines about the brilliance of super villain ‘Psycho Mantis’ from the Metal Gear Solid series, saying that:

The genius of Mantis as a villain is that he gets to rise above the usual cadre of Metal Gear Solid‘s half-vampires and nano-solidiers, to see the story for what it is. In a tale that oscillates between the natural and metaphysical, he gets to have it both ways. His supernatural stuff is technology: the system sitting in front of you. Standing apart from thousands of phony psychics, Mantis is the real deal, a seer who really can see something the rest of us can’t – the parameters of the game.

I have to admit there are some beautiful characters in video games. Not only do they look great but if they were any more photo-realistic and good-looking I might just develop a complex. The men and women running around saving the nation/world/galaxy from evil are not only fearless, but the finest physical specimens you will ever see. And that’s a shame.

At that point, the game had ceased to be anything except the gleeful abuse of a system that was clearly unprepared for aggressive extremes. The game was no longer a fight for Albion or differentiating myself from my sibling but was now a battle against what I saw to be an unfair binary, in which I could be a savior or a humanitarian, but not both. So with endless enthusiasm I turned the game in on itself, flaws and all, and beat it. Utterly. But was that worth completely objectifying its components, shattering the illusion of a living world?

Mike Schiller at Unlimited Lives looks at what makes the ‘Soul of the Game’, responding to comments made by Ron Gilbert that ‘Plot is what gives a game its soul’. But Schiller asks,

Where is the soul in a game like Asteroids? It’s a stark, black-and-white game with no music. There is nothing memorable about it save for the experience of playing it. Not coincidentally, that is where the soul is.

Some time ago, I read an article about the molten-diamond oceans of Neptune and Uranus. Imagine that for a moment: entire seas of liquefied diamonds, dotted by solid diamond icebergs. That right there is a case of fact being stranger than fiction. I can’t recall ever seeing something so amazing and unimaginable in a video-game world.

Though Black Ops blatantly lifts scenes and lines from cinema classics like Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter, it fails to communicate the same anti-war message that Kubrick and Cimino did.

Similarly, Brendan Keogh looked at the same commercial for CODBLOPS that inspired Omar Yusuf’s analysis, and looks at a range of responses to the video. His own take is that it further blurs the line between war and entertainment.

Ultimately, what I am trying to get at is that by acknowledging the idea of Zidane not assuming the role of the main character, we can get to understand the function behind the shift of perspectives and viewpoints in the narrative among the main characters in Final Fantasy IX. Indeed, for not long after Zidane’s conference with his fellow Tantalus members, the game assigns us the task to control Vivi, a character who comparatively occupies a greater story arc than Zidane. And through the vantage point of the young black mage who has just arrived to Alexandria, we, just like Vivi, begin to familiarize ourselves with the bustling city, participate in a couple of its optional events, dapple into its latest craze (i.e. the Tetra Master mini-game), and understand its rich history and social structure. Though the narrative briefly switches back to Zidane, we seamlessly soon get inside the rusty shoes of another character, Adelbert Steiner, the noble Knight of Alexandria, and the Captain of the Knights of Pluto, who initially harbors a different agenda (i.e. viewpoint) that goes against Zidane and Garnet’s.